Garrett M. Vonk

That you are throwing a baby shower for someone on another team is NOT grounds for sending an urgent email to everyone in the office.

I’m trying to get work done here, people.

Good: I’m in Florida with the wife visiting her parents. It’s a beautiful day.

Bad: Things went awry at work this week and I’m stuck in the inlaws’ kitchen (probably technically a breakfast nook) working away on my laptop today. It’s kind of a bummer, compared to all of the relaxing and non-work things I could be doing.

Good: I’m not in the office. I’ll finish putting out fires and can have a relaxing weekend without any calls from work. Then, we can enjoy the 11th Annual EPCOT Food and Wine Festival properly.

The phrase “Over the course of the Festival, there will be 1200 beer and wine seminars scheduled with complimentary samples” resonates pretty well with me…

To paraphrase what I said last week, sending an email every night to remind me that my mailbox is over the limit is tantamount to rear-ending people to inform them they’re not wearing seatbelts.

After 4 months at my job, I’ve reached the 120MB limit of the Exchange mailboxes here at work. I’ve commiserated over this before, but at this job, they send you an email every day to remind you that your mailbox is full. I guess nothing says “mailbox space is precious; you’ve run out” like clogging my inbox with apoplectic nastygrams.

Yes, I know that my linkdumps don’t actually count as posts, and I’ve been pretty blog-negligent lately. (Blegligent? Blogligent? Nlogligent?) Here’s a weekend recap:

• Friday: Heather flew back in from Orlando. Her plane took off early and landed early. Does that ever happen?
• Saturday: I went up to Jasper to help my Dad paint the mountain house. Moderate bonding and extremely dirty clothes ensued. For probably only the second time, I missed my SUV terribly as I gingerly wedged my paint-covered self into the driver’s seat, trying very hard–and failing–to keep my seats clean.
  Also, we saw Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. It was cool, though I’m definitely still over disgusted at paying $9.25 for a movie ticket.
• Sunday (yesterday): We walked over to the AVP Beach Volleyball tournament at Atlantic Station. It was enjoyable, though hot, and despite my inital suspicions, it had nothing to do with Alien Versus Predator. For some reason, the women’s tournament is more popular than the men’s. I wonder why that is…

From purely anecdotal evidence, I feel comfortable saying that a fairly large fraction of the total base of email-using professionals shares one of my (numerous) deficiencies. That is, I often send emails to clients or colleagues that say “Please review the attached file”, or “I’ve attached my XYZ Form”, or some other allusion to the fact that there is an attachment. And, of course, much of the time, I completely forget to actually attach the file in question.

Last week, after another particularly embarrassing occurrence, with its concomitant followup (”Sorry, here’s the attachment…”), I resolved to build some sort of barrier between my payload-free messages and their confused recipients-to-be. Or more accurately, some kind of airlock.

Here’s what I did: I created an Outlook rule that applies after I click “Send” in a message. If the message contains the words “attach”, “attached”, or “attachment”, but doesn’t actually have an attachment, Outlook holds the message for 5 minutes before sending. This way, I’ll see the message sitting there and think to myself “why isn’t this message sending?” If it just happened to have the word “attach” in it, even though no attachment was required, it’ll be on its merry way in 5 minutes anyway. If it needed an attachment but lacked one, I have ample time to notice and attach the file.

I’ve had this rule in place for a few days now, and it’s already saved me from such (admittedly minor) embarrassment once.

Just a quick post to recap our trip to Destin for Memorial Day Weekend.

This has been the third year in a row we’ve been, and it’s gotten crazier and crazier down there. The beach was completely packed with people drinking and partying (far more than we were on both accounts). It truly is “white-collar spring break”.

I ran into several people I know, including my old boss from my last job, and some guy I swam by about 20ft into the Gulf of Mexico who said “Hey, don’t you work for [my company]?” Yeah, in the ocean. It’s a small world.

I admit to being completely befuddled by telephone extensions on most corporate phone systems. At both my previous job and my new one, the system has been: you dial 5 digits to reach someone internally, or 9 + a regular phone number to call external numbers.

But at my last job, depending on which line you were using on the phone, you had to dial either 5 or 6 digits. I admit that sometimes I just hit 9 and dialed the person’s full phone number, even if they sat two cubes away. I like to think it’s just one of those things I never took the time to learn rather than something I couldn’t fully comprehend.

In other news, for some reason, my return to the blog was accompanied by a tremendous surfeit of new comment spam. All I did was change servers (and the necessary DNS settings) and install a new template. Apparently the spambots noticed the new layout and thought they’d try again. Fortunately, nobody made it past my spam bucket, so there wasn’t any visible pollution. But I may have been overzealous in my deleting, so if you left a comment in the last few days and it never appeared on the post, well… my apologies.

Week 1 of the new job is coming to a close. I’ve adapted to working downtown, and am enjoying very much the ability to ride in to work via Marta instead of driving. I’m by no means the type to agonize over driving a car to work; I’ve got other things to worry about. But I’m in the group of people for whom it is actually easier to ride the train to work. It takes nearly the same amount of time, and it’s cheaper than the parking alone, not to mention the savings on gas. At my old job, public transportation wasn’t a possibility, because it would have been at least an hour (3-4 times the drive time), and a mile-long walk on one end.

But now, parking at my office is on the order of $80-100 a month, and I thought I’d try to make it work on Marta. The Atlantic Station shuttle picks up at my door, and I’m generally at work 20 minutes later. The trip back is closer to 25-30 minutes, but with traffic in the city, I’d be hard-pressed to beat that by any significant margin in a car.

All in all, I think I’ll be able to continue to use transit to get to work for the foreseeable future.

To the four people who read this with any regularity, hello again. It’s been quite a while, in Internet Years, since I posted. The only real reason (besides sheer laziness) for my absence is that I was on a quest for employment. Things weren’t exactly awesome at the old job, and that particular nomenclature should tip you off to the fact that I have a new job. This is not to say that going dark is necessarily a prerequisite for a job search; no, I had my specific reasons this time. Namely, I noticed visitors in my logs from the domains of the precise companies to whom I had sent my resume.

Coincidence? Probably not. And while I’m not deathly afraid someone will stumble upon this happy little place and know my innermost secrets, I do find comfort in controlling the first impression I make, er, myself. I can’t necessarily do that with my real name plastered all over the place and my thoughts spilling down the page.

In summary: Paranoia and Laziness dictate my mien.

A month and a half ago, Heather and I took a weekend vacation to Acapulco with my mom. The photos demonstrate the utter majesty of the view from the hotel where we stayed, but do not accurately tell the whole story. I’ll write more about it later.

I’m off to gather my forms together for my first day at the new job (Monday 3/13) and perhaps relax at the park for a while.

I’m quite disappointed that I am not allowed to archive my email messages at work locally. Our Lotus Notes mail server allotment is a 200-megabyte pittance that I often bump into, even with careful pruning of large attachments. (Honestly, thank you so much for emailing the entire team 60 megs of wedding photos, unnamed person on my team.)

Part of this problem is that I’m a packrat, both online and in meatspace. I am enamored with the idea of being able to reference all of my email communication back over the years and dig out any of the important details, and I’ve already used Gmail countless times to backtrack in different ways. Where is that source for cheap batteries? Is that item I purchased still within the warranty period? What was I up to that day I supposedly earned a parking ticket?

Alas, I can’t move any of my messages to local storage for future reference. It’s understandable, as our software setup is predicated on the idea that we could pick up and do all our work from any PC on the network without any downtime, but it’s still frustrating to have to go through and delete valuable emails every few weeks. I’ll never get that data back!